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Monthly Archives: November 2018

I’ve made it a tradition to save a little bit of sand and a few shells from everywhere we visit. But, I ended up with a few mason jars, a few coffee cups, and a few paper towels filled with sand. I wanted to make a nicer looking container to display our souvenirs from our trips. Here is my final product 🙂

I started out with a display in mason jars, but it didn’t look exactly like I wanted. I found some ideas on Pinterest

I started by cutting a whole bunch of pieces of clear glass into 2 inch squares. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture, but here is the type of glass cutter I used. To make each cube, I cut out 5 clear glass squares and one blue glass square. I thought the blue glass would make a nice beachy background.

Once I had all of the squares cut, I taped around the edges with copper tape . It’s a bit tricky getting the tape even on both sides, but if one side looked better than the other, I made sure the better looking side was on the outside.

Then I used a plastic tool to smooth and stick down all of the edges. I’m not sure exactly what the tool is called, but it is sold for specifically that purpose and it is worth the $6 or $8. I think it is called a burnisher.

Then I painted all of the pieces with a tiny tiny amount of soldering flux. The purpose of the flux is the help the soldier stick. I have learned that you just need a tiny bit at a time.

Then I used my soldering iron to roughly assemble the box together. I just put a drop of solder on each side to hold it in place.

it’s probably now that I should mention that my cutting skills are not that precise, so the sides mostly matched, but there were a couple joins that I had to fill in gaps. The other thing is that my soldering skills are not the best either, so I used the solder to add some texture to each join. This covers up the gaps, and my poor soldering skills 🙂 I also kind of like the textured look.

I should also probably mention that the last time I really spent any time doing stained glass was before the kids were born… it’s not exactly a baby or toddler friendly craft. It has been boxed up for years. I learned how to do stained glass because I came up with the brilliant idea of making all of the table center pieces for our wedding out of stained glass. (No pressure there to learn, lol)

OK, back to the boxes, After I had 5 sides soldered together, I washed off the flux from the inside, made sure it was aand added the sand, and sealed the top.

I am pretty happy with the results, I have them displayed on our fireplace mantle now.

I also wrote on the back of each one where it was from, I still have to add the dates.

I’m still trying to think of a cute way to put the destinations on the front. Maybe I should have written it on a shell or something inside…

Now, I have to make another one from our trip out to the east cost! Check out the sand we collected from P.E.I.!